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Space photos of the day 09/07

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation Carina.NASA/Reuters

This image from the GOES-13 satellite, taken on Sept. 3, shows a huge Hurricane Earl, northeast of North Carolina with cloud cover stretching over the northeastern US. A disorganized Tropical Storm Fiona is located in the bottom right of this image.NASA/NOAA Goes Project

Astronaut John H. Glenn Jr., NASA flight surgeon William Douglas and equipment specialist Joseph W. Schmidt leave crew quarters prior to the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission in 1962. Glenn is in his pressure suit and is carrying the portable ventilation unit. The Mercury-Atlas 6 mission was NASA's first successful attempt to place an astronaut into orbit.NASA

The far side of the moon is shown in this image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from March 2010. The image shows the moon's topography from LRO's LOLA instruments with the highest elevations up above 20,000 feet in red and the lowest areas down below -20,000 feet in blue. THE LRO marked its one year anniversary in orbit on June 23. NASA/Goddard/Reuters

This is an artist's illustration of a massive asteroid crashing into Earth. The Earth may have experienced such gigantic impacts in its youth, but fortunately today there are no projectiles this large to threaten our planet.Don Davis, NASA

As part the STS-128 mission's first spacewalk, astronauts Danny Olivas and Nicole Stott (r.) removed an empty ammonia tank from the station's truss and temporarily stowed it on the station's robotic arm. Olivas and Stott also retrieved the European Technology Exposure Facility and Materials International Space Station Experiment from the Columbus laboratory module and installed them on Discovery's payload bay for return. NASA

Red and green colors predominate in this view of the Aurora Australis, or southern polar lights, photographed from the Space Shuttle in May 1991 at the peak of the last geomagnetic maximum. The payload bay and tail of the Shuttle can be seen on the left hand side of the picture.NASA

This undated handout photo provided by SpaceX shows the DragonLab in orbit. The DragonLab will be used to supply the International Space Station. In its budget released Feb. 1, the Obama administration proposed spending billions of dollars to encourage private companies to build, launch and operate spacecraft for NASA and others. SpaceX/AP

In this image provided by NASA the Space Shuttle Atlantis is lowered toward its external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters in the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 14. NASA/Cory Huston/AP

The Mataiva Atoll, Tuamotu Archipelago in the South Pacific Ocean is featured in this image photographed by an Expedition 24 crew member on the International Space Station this August. The Tuamotu Archipelago is part of French Polynesia, and forms the largest chain of atolls in the world. NASA/AP